Preface to the Russian Translation of Karl Marx’s Letters to Dr. Kugelmann

Written:February 5, 1907Published:Published in 1907 in the pamphlet: Karl Marx.Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, edited and with a preface by N. Lenin.Novaya DumaPublishers, St. Petersburg.

      Published according to the text of the pamphlet.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Foreign Languages Publishing House,1962,

      Moscow,Volume 12,

      pages104-112.Translated:Transcription:D. WaltersandZodiacHTML Markup:B. BagginsandD. WaltersPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      Online Version: marx.org 1993

      (1999).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Ourpurpose in issuing as a separate pamphlet the full collection of
Marx’s letters to Kugelmann published in the German Social-Democratic
weekly,Neue Zeit, is to acquaint the Russian public more closely with
Marx and Marxism. As was to be expected, a good deal of space in Marx’s
correspondence is devoted to personal matters. This is exceedingly valuable
material for the biographer. But for the general public, and for the Russian
working class in particular, those passages in the letters which contain
theoretical and political material are infinitely more important. In the
revolutionary period we are now passing through, it is particularly instructive
for us to make a careful study of this material, which reveals Marx as a man who
responded directly to all questions of the labour movement and world
politics. The editors ofNeue Zeitare quite right in saying that
“we are elevated by an acquaintance with the personality of men whose
thoughts and wills took shape in the period of great upheavals”. Such an
acquaintance is doubly necessary to the Russian socialist in 1907, for it
provides a wealth of very valuable material indicating the direct tasks
confronting socialists in every revolution through which a country
passes. Russia is experiencing a “great upheaval” at this very
moment. In the present Russian revolution the Social-Democrat should more and
more frequently pattern his policy after that of Marx in the comparatively
stormy sixties.

Weshall, therefore, permit ourselves to make only brief mention of those
passages in Marx’s correspondence that are of particular importance from
the theoretical standpoint,and shall deal in greater detail with his revolutionary policy as a
representative of the proletariat.

Ofoutstanding interest as a contribution to a fuller and more profound
understanding of Marxism is the letter of July 11, 1868 (p. 42, et

seq.).[1]In the form of a polemic against the vulgar economists, Marx
in this letter very clearly expoundshisconception of what is
called the “labour” theory of value. Those very objections to
Marx’s theory of value which naturally arise in the minds of the
least trained readers ofCapitaland for this reason are most
eagerly seized upon by the common or garden representatives of
“professorial” bourgeois “science”, are here analysed by Marx briefly,
simply, and with remarkable lucidity. Marx here shows the road he took and
the road to be taken towards elucidation of the law of value. He teaches us
hismethod, using the most common objections as illustrations. He
makes clear the connection between such a purely (it would seem)
theoretical and abstract question as the theory of value and “the interest
of the ruling classes”, which must be “to perpetuate
confusion”. It is only to be hoped that every one who begins to study
Marx and readCapitalwill read and re-read this letter when
studying the first and most difficult chapters of that book.

Otherpassages in the letters that are very interesting from the theoretical
standpoint are those in which Marx passes judgement on various writers. When you
read these opinions of Marx—vividly written, full of passion and
revealing a profound interest in all the great ideological trends and in an
analysis of them—you realise that you are listening to the words of a
great thinker. Apart from the remarks on Dietzgen, made in passing, the comments
on the Proudhonists

(p. 17)[2]deserve particular attention from the reader. The
“brilliant” young bourgeois intellectuals who dash “into the thick of
the proletariat” at times of social upheaval, and are incapable of
acquiring the stand point of the working class or of carrying on persistent
and serious work among the “rank and file” of the proletarian
organisations, are depicted with remarkable vividness in a few strokes of
the pen.

Takethe comment on Dühring

(p. 35),[3]which, as it were, anticipates the contents of the famousAnti-Dühringwritten by Engels (in conjunction with Marx) nine years later. There is a
      Russian translation of this book by Zederbaum which, unfortunately, is
      not only guilty of omissions but is simply a poor translation, with
      mistakes. Here, too, we have the comment on Thünen, which likewise
      touches on Ricardo’s theory of rent. Marx had already, in 1868,
      emphatically rejected “Ricardo’s errors”, which he
      finally refuted in Volume III ofCapital, published in 1894, but
    which to this very day are repeated by the revisionists— from our
    ultra-bourgeois and even “Black-Hundred” Mr. Bulgakov to the
    “almost orthodox” Maslov.

Interesting,too, is the comment on Büchner, with an appraisal of vulgar
materialism and of the “superficial nonsense” copied from Lange
(the usual source of “professorial” bourgeois philosophy!)

(p. 48).[4]

Letus pass to Marx’s revolutionary policy. There is among
Social-Democrats in Russia a surprisingly widespread philistine conception of
Marxism, according to which a revolutionary period, with its specific forms of
struggle and its special proletarian tasks, is almost an anomaly, while a
“constitution” and an “extreme opposition” are the
rule. In no other country in the world at this moment is there such a profound
revolutionary crisis as in Russia— and in no other country are there
“Marxists” (belittlers and vulgarisers of Marxism) who take up such
a sceptical and philistine attitude towards the revolution. From the fact that
the revolution is bourgeois in content they draw the shallow conclusion that the
bourgeoisie isthe driving forceof the revolution, that the tasks of
the proletariat in this revolution are of an ancillary, not independent,
character and that proletarian leadership of the revolution is impossible!

Howexcellently Marx, in his letters to Kugelmann, exposes this shallow
interpretation of Marxism! Here is a letter dated April 6, 1866. At that time
Marx had finished his principal work. He had given his final judgement on the
German Revolution of 1848 fourteen years before this letter was written. He had
himself, in 1850, renounced his socialist illusions that a socialist revolution
was impending in 1848. And in 1866, when only just beginning to observe the
growth of new political crises, he writes:

“Willour philistines [he is referring to the German bourgeois liberals]
at last realise that without a revolution which removes the Hapsburgs and
Hohenzollerns ... there must finally come another Thirty Years’
War...!”

(pp. 13-14).[5]

Thereis not a shadow of illusion here that the impending revolution (it took
place from above, not from below as Marx had expected) would remove the
bourgeoisie and capitalism, but a most clear and precise statement that it would
remove only the Prussian and Austrian monarchies. And what faith in this
bourgeois revolution! What revolutionary passion of a proletarian fighter who
realises the vast significance the bourgeois revolution has for the progress of
the socialist movement!

Noting“a very interesting” social movement three years later, on
the eve of the downfall of the Napoleonic Empire in France, Marx says in apositive outburst of enthusiasmthat “the Parisians are making a
regular study of their recent revolutionary past, in order to prepare themselves
for the business of the impending new revolution”. And describing the
struggle of classes revealed in this study of the past, Marx concludes (p. 56):
“And so the whole historical witches’ cauldron is bubbling. When willour country[Germany] be so

far.”[6]

Suchis the lesson to be learned from Marx by the Russian Marxist
intellectuals, who are debilitated by scepticism, dulled by pedantry, have a
penchant for penitent speeches, rapidly tire of the revolution, and yearn, as
for a holiday, for the interment of the revolution and its replacement by
constitutional prose. From the theoretician and leader of the proletarians they
should learn faith in the revolution, the ability to call on the working class
to fight for its immediate revolutionary aims to the last, and a firmness of
spirit which admits of no faint-hearted whimpering following temporary setbacks
of the revolution.

Thepedants of Marxism think that this is all ethical twaddle, romanticism, and
lack of a sense of reality! No, gentlemen, this is the combination of
revolutionary theory and revolutionary policy, without which Marxism becomes

Brentanoism,[7]Struvism[8]and

Sombartism.[9]The Marxian doctrine has fused the theory and practice of
the classstruggle into one inseparable whole. And he is no Marxist who takes a theory
      that soberly states the objective situation and distorts it into a
      justification of the existing order and even goes to the length of trying
      to adapt himself as quickly as possible to every temporary decline
      in the revolution, to discard “revolutionary illusions” as
      quickly as possible, and to turn to “realistic” tinkering.

Intimes that were most peaceful, seemingly “idyllic”, as Marx
expressed it, and “wretchedly stagnant” (asNeue Zeitput
it), Marx was able to sense the approach of revolution andto rousethe proletariat to a consciousness of its advanced revolutionary tasks. Our
Russian intellectuals, who vulgarise Marx in a philistine manner, in the most
revolutionary times teach the proletariat a policy of passivity, of submissively
“drifting with the current”, of timidly supporting the most unstable
elements of the fashionable liberal party!

Marx’sassessment of the Commune crowns the letters to Kugelmann. And this
assessment is particularly valuable when compared with the methods of the
Russian Right-wing Social-Democrats. Plekhanov, who after December 1905
faint-heartedly exclaimed: “They should not have taken up arms”, had
the modesty to compare himself to Marx. Marx, says he, also put the brakes on
the revolution in 1870.

Yes,Marxalsoput the brakes on the revolution. But see what a gulf
lies between Plekhanov and Marx, in Plekhanov’s own comparison!

InNovember 1905, a month before the first revolutionary wave in Russia had
reached its climax, Plekhanov, far from emphatically warning the proletariat,
spoke directly of the necessityto learn to use arms and to arm. Yet,
when the struggle flared up a month later, Plekhanov, without making the
slightest attempt to analyse its significance, its role in the general course of
events and its connection with previous forms of struggle, hastened to play the
part of a penitent intellectual and exclaimed: “They should not have taken
up arms.”

InSeptember 1870, six months beforethe Commune, Marx gave a direct
warning to the French workers: insurrection would bean act of desperate
folly, he said in the well-known Address of the

International.[10]He exposedin advancethe nationalistic illusions of the possibility of a movement
in the spirit of 1792. He was able to say,not after the event, but
many months before: “Don’t take up arms.”

Andhow did he behave when thishopelesscause, as he himself had
called it in September, began to take practical shape in March 1871? Did he use
it (as Plekhanov did the December events) to “take a dig” at his
enemies, the Proudhonists and Blanquists who were leading the Commune? Did he
begin to scold like a schoolmistress, and say: “I told you so, I warned
you; this is what comes of your romanticism, your revolutionary ravings”? Did
he preach to the Communards, as Plekhanov did to the December fighters, the
sermon of the smug philistine: “You should not have taken up arms”?

No.On April 12, 1871, Marx writes anenthusiasticletter to
Kugelmann—a letter which we would like to see hung in the home of every
Russian Social-Democrat and of every literate Russian worker.

InSeptember 1870 Marx had called the insurrection an act of desperate folly;
but in April 1871, when he saw the mass movement of the people, he watched it
with the keen attention of a participant in great events marking a step forward
in the historic revolutionary movement.

Thisis anattempt, he says, to smash the bureaucratic military
machine, and not simply to transfer it to different hands. And he has words of
the highest praise for the“heroic”Paris workers led by
the Proudhonists and Blanquists. “What elasticity,” he writes,
“what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these
Parisians! ...
[p. 88]. History has no like example of a like greatness.

Thehistorical initiativeof the masses was what Marx prized above
everything else. Ah, if only our Russian Social-Democrats would learn from Marx
how to appreciate thehistorical initiativeof the Russian workers and
peasants in October and December 1905!

Comparethe homage paid to thehistorical initiativeof the masses by a
profound thinker, who foresaw failure six months ahead—and the lifeless,
soulless, pedantic:

“They should not have taken up arms”! Are these not as far apart as heaven
and earth?

Andlike aparticipantin the mass struggle, to which he reacted with
    all his characteristic ardour and passion, Marx, then living in exile in
    London, set to work to criticise theimmediate stepsof the
    “recklessly brave” Parisians who were“ready to storm
      heaven”.

Ah,how our present “realist” wiseacres among the Marxists, who in
1906-07 are deriding revolutionary romanticism in Russia, would have sneered at
Marx at the time! How people would have scoffed ata materialist, an
economist, an enemy of utopias, who pays homage to an
“attempt” to
stormheaven!What tears, condescending smiles or commiseration these
“men in

mufflers”[11]would have bestowed upon him for his rebel tendencies,
utopianism, etc., etc., and for his appreciation of a heaven-storming
movement!

ButMarx was not inspired with the wisdom of the small fry who are afraid to
discuss thetechniqueof the higher forms of revolutionary struggle. It
is precisely thetechnicalproblems of the insurrection that he
discussed. De fence or attack?—he asked, as if the military operations
were taking place just outside London. And he decided that it must certainly be
attack: “They should have marched at once on Versailles...”.

Thiswas written in April 1871, a few weeks before the great and bloody May....

“Theyshould have marched at once on Versailles”— the insurgents
should, those who had begun the “act of desperate folly” (September
1870) of storming heaven.

“Theyshould not have taken up arms” in December 1905 in order to
oppose by force the first attempts to take away the liberties that had been
won....

Yes,Plekhanov had good reason to compare himself to Marx!

“Secondmistake,” Marx said, continuing histechnicalcriticism: “The Central Committee” (themilitary
command— note this—the reference is to the Central Committee of
the National Guard) “surrendered its powertoo soon...”.

Marxknew how to warn theleadersagainst a premature rising. But his
attitude towards the heaven-stormingproletariatwas that of a
practical adviser, of a participant in thestruggleof the masses, who
were raising thewholemovement toa higher levelin spite of the false theories and mistakes
of Blanqui and Proudhon.

“Howeverthat may be,” he wrote, “the present rising in
Paris—even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine, and vile curs of the old
society—is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June

insurrection....”[12]

And,without concealing from the proletariata singlemistake of the
Commune, Marx dedicated to thisheroic deeda work whichto this
very dayserves as the best guide in the fight for “heaven” and
as a frightful bugbear to the liberal and radical “swine”.

Plekhanovdedicated to the December events a “work” which has become
practically the bible of the Cadets.

Yes,Plekhanov had good reason to compare himself to Marx.

Kugelmannapparently replied to Marx expressing certain doubts, referring to
the hopelessness of the struggle and to realism as opposed to
romanticism—at any rate, he compared the Commune, aninsurrection, to the peaceful demonstration in Paris on June 13, 1849.

Marximmediately (April 17, 1871) severely lectured Kugelmann.

“Worldhistory,” he wrote, “would indeed be very easy
to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly
favourable chances.”

InSeptember 1870, Marx called the insurrection an act of desperate folly. But,
when themassesrose, Marx wanted to march with them, to learn with
them in the process of the struggle, and not to give them bureaucratic
admonitions. He realised that to attempt in advance to calculate the chanceswith complete accuracywould be quackery or hope less pedantry. What he
valuedabove everything elsewas that the working class heroically and
self-sacrificingly took the initiative inmakingworld history. Marx
regarded world history from the standpoint of those whomakeit without
being in a position to calculate the chancesinfalliblybeforehand,
and not from the standpoint of an intellectual philistine who moralises:
“It was easy to foresee ... they should not have taken up...”.

Marxwas also able to appreciate that there are moments in history when a
desperate struggle of themasses, evenfor a hopeless cause, isessentialfor the further schooling of these
    masses and their training for thenextstruggle.

Suchastatementof the question is quite incomprehensible and even
alien in principle to our present-day quasi-Marxists, who like to take the name
of Marx in vain, to borrow only his estimate of the past, and not his ability to
make the future. Plekhanov did not even think of it when be set out after
December 1905 “to put the brakes on”.

Butit is precisely this question that Marx raised, with out in the least
forgetting that he himself in September 1870 regarded insurrection as an act of
desperate folly.

“...The bourgeoiscanailleof Versailles,” he wrote,
presented the Parisians with the alternative of either
taking up the fight or succumbing without a struggle. Thedemoralisation of
the working classin the latter case would have been afar greatermisfortune than the succumbing of any number of

’leaders’.”[13]

Andwith this we shall conclude our brief review of the lessons in a policy
worthy of the proletariat which Marx teaches in his letters to Kugelmann.

Theworking class of Russia has already proved once, and will prove again more
than once, that it is capable of “storming heaven”.

February 5, 1907

[1]Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence,
Moscow, 1955,
pp. 250-53.

[2]Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955,
pp. 222-23.

[3]Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence,
Moscow, 1955, p. 240.

[4]Karl Marx,Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, Moscow, 1934, p. 80.

[5]Karl Marx,Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, Moscow, 1934,
p. 35.

[6]Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, pp. 263-64.

[7]Brentanoism—a bourgeois liberal teaching
recognising the non-revolutionary ’class’ struggle of the proletariat”

(geepresent edition, Vol. 28, “The Proletarian Revolution and the
Renegade Kautsky”); it preached the possibility of solving the workers’ problems
within the framework of capitalism through factory legislation and the
organisation of the workers in trade unions. It took its name from the German
bourgeois economist, Lujo
Brentano (1844-1931).

[8]Struvism or“legal Marxism”—a liberal
bourgeois distortion of Marxism that emerged as an independent socio-political
trend in the nineties of the nineteenth century among Russian liberal bourgeois
intellectuals.

Bythat time Marxism had become fairly widespread in Russia and bourgeois
intellectuals began preaching their own views under cover of Marxism in legal
newspapers and magazines; for this reason they were called “legal
Marxists”.

Thelegal Marxists criticised the Narodniks for their defence of petty
production and tried to use Marxism in this struggle, but the kind of Marxism
they wanted was one purged of all its revolutionary content. Attempting to
subordinate the working-class movement to the interests of the bourgeoisie, they
discarded Marxism’s most important feature—the theory of the proletarian
revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. P. Struve, leader of the
legal Marxists, lauded capitalism and, instead of a revolutionary struggle
against the capitalist system, called for “a recognition of our
backwardness” and proposed “learning from capitalism”. The
legal Marxists revised almost all the basic postulatesof Marxism and adopted the viewpoint of bourgeois objectivism, the viewpoint of
Kantianism, and subjective idealism.

Leninrecognised the liberal bourgeois nature of legal Marxism earlier than
anybody else did. In his article “On the So-Called Market Question”
Lenin, as

far hackas 1893, criticised the views of the legal Marxists, then a
new trend, at the time he exposed the views of the liberal Narodniks. The legal
Marxists were the first hidden enemies the Russian Marxists came up
against. They called themselves followers of

Marx hutactually deprived Marxism
of its revolutionary content. In their struggle against the Narodniks, however,
the Russian revolutionary Marxists entered into temporary agreements with the
legal Marxists and published their own articles in journals edited by legal
Marxists. At the same time, in his article “The Economic Content of
Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve’s Book”, Lenin severely
criticised legal Marxism, calling it the reflection of Marxism in bourgeois
literature, and exposed the “legal Marxists” as the ideologists of
the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin’s characterisation of the “legal
Marxists” was later confirmed in full—they became prominent Cadets
and, later, fanatical whiteguards.

Lenin’sdetermined struggle against the “legal Marxists” in Russia
was also a struggle against international revisionism and was an example of
ideological irreconcilability with distortions of
the Marxist theory.

[9]Sombartism—liberal bourgeois trend named
after Werner Sombart (1863-1941), a vulgar bourgeois economist, one of the
ideologists of liberalism in Germany. Sombart, Lenin wrote, has
“substituted Brentanoism for Marxism by employing Marxian terminology, by
quoting some of Marx’s statements and by assuming a Marxist disguise” (see
present edition, Vol. 10, p. 260).

[10]Marx and Engels,Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 491-98.

[11]The Man in a Muffler—the central
character in a story of that name by Anton Chekhov—a limited, philistine
type who fears all initiative and everything new.

[12]Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1958,
pp. 318-19.

[13]Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1958, p. 320.